Wentworth outlines development plans

Wentworth Institute of Technology on Wednesday unveiled plans for its 31-acre campus in Mission Hill and Fenway, outlining a vision that includes hundreds of dormitory rooms and a new quad on what is now a surface parking lot. During the next decade, the university plans to replace outdated dorms with three residence halls, creating 935 net new beds. Two of the dorms — a proposed 21-story, 672-bed tower and another 13story, 522-bed facility — would be built on Huntington Avenue on either side of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design’s orange-and-green Tree House dorm. Wentworth also plans to build an athletics field house, a welcome center, and new homes for its schools of architecture and design, engineering, and management, according to an institutional master plan filed with the Boston Planning and Development Agency. The school also plans to raze a century-old former Boston Public School building that has “far exceeded its useful life” to create a modern facility for Wentworth’s schools of engineering and management. Wentworth has 3,605 undergraduate and graduate students this year, with 3,724 students projected for 2025. Not all students are guaranteed housing, but the new dorms would allow the university to offer on-campus living to upperclassmen and graduate students, relieving some housing pressure on nearby neighborhoods, Cote said. Another key element of Wentworth’s plan is transforming surface parking lots into green space, rather than developing a parking garage. One park, which Wentworth is calling “The Grove,” is envisioned next to the 23-story residence hall as “a tree-lined quad that can be activated, programmed, and used by students for outdoor classes, movie nights, graduation ceremonies, and other activities,” the BPDA filing states. — CATHERINE CARLOCK